rmed, and
therefore the more reckless, use of this optical resource. Not under
any provocation to produce it in public was her unremitted rule; but
the difficulties of duplicity had not shrunk, while the need of it had
doubled. Humbugging, which she had so practised with her father, had
been a comparatively simple matter on the basis of mere doubt; but the
ground to be covered was now greatly larger, and she felt not unlike
some young woman of the theatre who, engaged for a minor part in the
play and having mastered her cues with anxious effort, should find
herself suddenly promoted to leading lady and expected to appear in
every act of the five. She had made much to her husband, that last
night, of her "knowing"; but it was exactly this quantity she now
knew that, from the moment she could only dissimulate it, added to her
responsibility and made of the latter all a mere question of having
something precious and precarious in charge. There was no one to help
her with it--not even Fanny Assingham now; this good friend's presence
having become, inevitably, with that climax of their last interview in
Portland Place, a severely simplified function. She had her use, oh
yes, a thousand times; but it could only consist henceforth in her quite
conspicuously touching at no point whatever--assuredly, at least with
Maggie--the matter they had discussed. She was there, inordinately, as a
value, but as a value only for the clear negation of everything. She was
their general sign, precisely, of unimpaired beatitude--and she was to
live up to that somewhat arduous character, poor thing, as she might.
She might privately lapse from it, if she must, with Amerigo or with
Charlotte--only not, of course, ever, so much as for the wink of an eye,
with the master of the house. Such lapses would be her own affair, which
Maggie at present could take no thought of. She treated her young friend
meanwhile, it was to be said, to no betrayal of such wavering; so that
from the moment of her alighting at the door with the Colonel everything
went on between them at concert pitch. What had she done, that last
evening in Maggie's room, but bring the husband and wife more together
than, as would seem, they had ever been? Therefore what indiscretion
should she not show by attempting to go behind the grand appearance of
her success?--which would be to court a doubt of her beneficent work.
She knew accordingly nothing but harmony and diffused, restlessly,
no